This week's chapter in the CyberPR Blog Contest is centered around a very important paradigm that some artists don't necessarily like to embrace; The concept of thinking of themselves as a commodity and their fans as a customer. I admit, I'm not always comfortable with that notion, but I completely agree with it, especially from a business standpoint. If you want to have a successful business, you have to give your customers want they want. Same thing with being a successful musician, gotta give the fans what they want.

One of Ariel's tips is moving away from the old business model of selling a few things to a large group of people, but instead, sell many things to a smaller group of people. Instead of trying to reach all of the masses, find your hardcore group of fans and deliver products to them that they WANT to buy from you.

So how do you do that? She suggests to start out by building up rapport with your email list. Don't communicate with them only when you're trying to sell something, but instead reach out to them for other reasons to help foster the relationship.

Ariel provides us with her 3-step process on how to get the most out of our newsletter - Greeting, Guts, and Getting. Start off with a personal greeting, something non-musical. Then move to the Guts of the email aka "the meat" of the newsletter. Then the last step is Getting them to act. Put in something that will get them to take action, like joining up to follow you on a social networking site, or offering them a free download, etc...

The next section is about using surveys to find out what your fans want so that you can maximize your potential to deliver it to them. She suggests waiting until you have a real fan base (minimum 1,000 strong) to ask them what they want from you. It's gonna be awhile before I get to that level but fortunately for me, the next chapter in the book is on growing your list :-)

I think the thing that I'll definitely take away from this lesson is the concept of selling many things to fewer people. Not sure what I'm going to do to make that work for me just yet, but I'll be spending some time brainstorming on that one for sure. Might even try and get some ideas from my fans while I'm at it... :-)

3 comments:

Well, I'm now totally up-to-date on your blog and it is EXTREMELY HELPFUL. My browser is full of open tabs of links I've gotten from your blog including other artists mentioned.

I'm really excited to start learning more about getting in to the world of licensing my music and I've been working towards familiarizing myself with Pro Tools and practicing my production skills so that I can start contributing to online Music Production Libraries.

I had already started streamlining my blog, Twitter, and MySpace, but now I need to start making my blog do something.

I'm definitely going to be ordering 'Music Success in Nine Weeks'. That sounds like the perfect thing to help me lay out and implement some sort of strategy.

Thanks for blogging and keep up the hard work. And as a fellow animal person, congratulations on the new family members.

@Cody... Thanks again man. I definitely recommend Ariel's book. Definitely helps you develop a long term plan instead of just wandering aimlessly. Feel free to email via the contact form on my site if you have any questions with Pro Tools and I'll do what I can to help.